Cloud computing cannot exist without
automation. The entire concept of the rapid self-provisioning of pooled cloud resources (compute instances, storage, virtual networking, and many others) is built on an assumption that the whole provisioning process, from the beginning to the end, is fully automated. Simply because there are no manual steps involved, it is possible to represent the complete cloud infrastructure in the form of scripts and templates that are used to remotely manage cloud resources. Figure
3-1 shows a mind map of a few related operational ...